News

Cloud vs. on-premises: Finding the right balance

March 8, 2018

Greg Downer, senior IT director at Oshkosh Corp., a manufacturer of specialty heavy vehicles in Oshkosh, Wisc., wishes he could tip the balance of on-premises vs. cloud more in the direction of the cloud, which currently accounts for only about 20% of his application footprint. However, as a contractor for the Department of Defense, his company is beholden to strict data requirements, including where data is stored.

“Cloud offerings have helped us deploy faster and reduce our data center infrastructure, but the main reason we don’t do more in the cloud is because of strict DoD contract requirements for specific types of data,” he says.

In Computerworld’s Tech Forecast 2017 survey of 196 IT managers and leaders, 79% of respondents said they have a cloud project underway or planned, and 58% of those using some type of cloud-based system gave their efforts an A or B in terms of delivering business value.

Downer counts himself among IT leaders bullish on the cloud and its potential for positive results. “While we don’t have a written cloud-first statement, when we do make new investments we look at what the cloud can offer,” he says.

ADVERTISING

Oshkosh has moved some of its back-office systems, including those supporting human resources, legal and IT, to the cloud. He says most of the cloud migration has been from legacy systems to software as a service (SaaS). For instance, the organization uses ServiceNow’s SaaS for IT and will soon use it for facilities management.

According to the Forecast report, a third of respondents plan to increase spending on SaaS in the next 12 months.

Cordell Schachter, CTO of New York City’s Department of Transportation, says he allies with the 22% of survey respondents who plan to increase investments in a hybrid cloud computing environment. The more non-critical applications he moves out of the city’s six-year-old data center, the more room he’ll have to support innovative new projects such as the Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program, a joint effort with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office.

The Connected Vehicle project, in the second year of a five-year pilot, aims to use dedicated short-range communication coupled with a network of in-vehicle and roadway sensors to automatically notify drivers of connected vehicles of traffic issues. “If there is an incident ahead of you, your car will either start braking on its own or you’ll get a warning light saying there’s a problem up ahead so you can avoid a crash,” Schachter says. The program’s intent is to reduce the more than 30,000 vehicle fatalities that occur in the U.S. each year.

Supporting that communication network and the data it generates will require more than the internal data center, though. Schachter says the effort will draw on a hybrid of on-premises and cloud-based applications and infrastructure. He expects to tap a combination of platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and SaaS to get to the best of breed for each element of the program.

“We can use the scale of cloud providers and their expertise to do things we wouldn’t be able to do internally,” he says, adding that all providers must meet NYC DOT’s expectations of “safer, faster, smarter and cheaper.”

In fact, Schachter has walled off only a few areas that aren’t candidates for the cloud — such as emergency services and email. “NYC DOT is one of the most sued entities in New York City, and we constantly need to search our corpus of emails. We have a shown a net positive by keeping that application on-premises to satisfy Freedom of Information Law requests as well as litigation,” he says.

The City of Los Angeles also has its share of applications that are too critical to go into the cloud, according to Ted Ross, CIO and general manager of the city’s Information Technology Agency. For instance, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), 911 Dispatch, undercover police operations, traffic control and wastewater management are the types of data sets that will remain on-premises for the foreseeable future.

“The impact of an abuse is so high that we wouldn’t consider these applications in our first round of cloud migrations. As you can imagine, it’s critical that a hacker not gain access to release sewage into the ocean water or try to turn all streetlights green at the same time,” he says.

The cloud does serve as an emergency backup to the $108 million state-of-the-art emergency operations center. “If anything happens to the physical facility, our software, mapping and other capabilities can quickly spin up in the cloud,” he says, adding that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure provide many compelling use cases.

The city, with more than 1,000 virtual servers on-premises, considers the cloud a cost-effective godsend. “We very much embrace the cloud because it provides an opportunity to lower costs, makes us more flexible and agile, offers off-site disaster recovery, empowers IT personnel, and provides a better user experience,” he says.

SaaS is a gateway drug to other cloud services.
Ted Ross, CIO, city of Los Angeles
As an early adopter of Google’s Gmail in 2010, Ross appreciates the value of the cloud, so much so that in 2014, the city made cloud a primary business model, starting with SaaS, which he calls “a gateway drug to other cloud services.”

Eventually, the city ventured into infrastructure as a service, including using “a lot of Amazon Web Services,” which Ross describes as more invasive than SaaS and more in need of collaboration between the service provider and the network team. “You have to be prepared to have a shared security model and to take the necessary steps to enact it,” he says. Cloud computing also requires additional network bandwidth to reduce latency and maximize performance, he adds.

Other reasons for saying no to the cloud
As much as Ross is a cloud promoter, he says he fully understands the 21% of respondents to Computerworld’s Forecast survey who say they have no plans to move to the cloud. “I get worried when users simply want to spin up anything anywhere and are only concerned about functionality, not connectivity and security.”

Ron Heinz, founder and managing director of venture capital firm Signal Peak Ventures, says there will always be a market for on-premises applications and infrastructure. For instance, one portfolio client that develops software for accountants found that 40% of its market don’t want to move their workflow to the cloud.

Heinz attributes the hesitation to more mature accounting professionals and those with security concerns. “Everybody automatically assumes there is a huge migration to the cloud. But there will always be a segment that will never go the cloud as long as you have strong virtual private networks and strong remote access with encrypted channels,” he says.

Greg Collins, founder and principal analyst at analyst firm Exact Ventures, has found clients usually stick with on-premises when they are still depreciating their servers and other gear. “They have the attitude ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,'” he says.

Still, he also believes the cloud is still in the early days and will only grow as the installed base of on-premises equipment hits end of life.